{"id":442,"date":"2011-02-17T21:59:25","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T21:59:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.astick.net\/blog\/?p=442"},"modified":"2014-02-02T22:55:18","modified_gmt":"2014-02-02T22:55:18","slug":"the-gulf-war-did-not-take-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/the-gulf-war-did-not-take-place\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gulf War Did Not Take Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just stumbled across The Gulf War Did Not Take Place<\/a><\/em> (Oddly I was searching for “The Golf War”, an weird little TV show with Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher, but Google insisted on correcting it to the above. It was intriguing so I clicked.)<\/p>\n

Now Baudrillard, the author of the articles, seems very much like the stereotypical French “philosopher”<\/a>. However they do make a fascinating statistical claim: “fewer US soldiers were killed in this ‘war’ than would have died in traffic accidents had they stayed at home”. For no reason I decided to investigate.<\/p>\n

Looking into it further, there were a total of 294 US casualties in the Gulf War. However only 114 were due to enemy fire (35 were killed by friendly fire, 145 in accidents).<\/p>\n

According to nationmaster.com, the total number of US troops deployed in Gulf War I was about 697,000. And thankfully Wikipedia has an article for everything, including “List of motor vehicle deaths in U.S. by year”<\/a> (note to self – clean this article up!). That even helpfully gives deaths as a fraction of the population per year; for 1990 it was 0.000178779. So that gives an estimated 125 deaths among the troops, had they all remained at home for a whole year.<\/p>\n

Obviously there are a whole host of confusing factors here: different lengths and timings of deployment, soldiers being an age\/sex skewed section of the U.S. population and so probably having higher traffic death rates. But although the precise statistics may be debatable, the overall point is a valid one: the Gulf War had a remarkably low fatality rate for the U.S.<\/p>\n

Of course this is only deaths, it doesn’t count injuries, PTSD or the mysterious “Gulf War syndrome”. Ironically whilst Googling for analysis of this claim, I found a study (http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/16484030) apparently showing that in the years after<\/em> the war, veterans suffered significantly more traffic fatalities than non-veterans.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I should do some real work now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just stumbled across The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Oddly I was searching for “The Golf War”, an weird little TV show with Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher, but Google insisted on correcting it to the above. It was intriguing so I clicked.) Now Baudrillard, the author of the articles, seems very much … Continue reading The Gulf War Did Not Take Place<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":571,"href":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions\/571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moononastick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}